In the order of importance, I am a mother, I’m a wife and I take anything that has to do with my family seriously. I have siblings and I have a mum b… - Olanike Adeyemo

I don’t think we have enough. We don’t. In my area now, we don’t have enough. Veterinarians work in many areas and they are also in charge of ensuring that what we eat is safe aside from those who work on poultry farms and those that treat dogs and all that. We don’t have enough as I said. Even though we don’t have enough to cover our abattoirs, it is better now than when I was an undergraduate. The system does not even retain the ones we have. What used to happen back then was if you went into Vet Medicine, you would not be allowed to change your course even if you wanted to change. But now, we no longer want people that are there grudgingly.

I didn’t choose Vet Medicine. You know how it is with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board and during my time, there were few professions parents wanted their children to go into. Parents wanted their children to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers during my time. If you were good at science subjects, they wanted you to become a doctor. When I took the University Matriculation Examination (now Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination), my parents chose Medicine but I did not meet the cutoff mark. I later changed my choice of course of study. One of my dad’s friends, a professor of Veterinary Medicine, said he would have loved me to study Vet Medicine but he said it was too tough that I would not be able to cope. But that was a challenge to me and because he said I would not be able to cope, I said that was what I wanted and that was how I ended up in Veterinary Medicine.

Whatever we push into the environment eventually comes back to us because we are higher animals but it takes longer for those effects to manifest in us because of our body mass and all that.